Stork Raving Mad(80)

“Hey, Mrs. Waterston!” A couple of students were passing through the kitchen. “Can we save you a seat?”

“No thanks,” I said. “Going to bed.”

“Good night!” they called as they galloped out the back door and slammed it behind them.

I glanced out the back window. Occasionally, when the barn door opened, I could catch a burst of talk and laughter, so the noise level inside must have been very loud indeed.

“Ms. Langslow?”

I turned to find the chief standing in the doorway.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’ve just talked to the DA,” the chief said. “He’s asked me to put Mr. Oh and Ms. Borgstrom under arrest now. Mr. Oh asked if he could talk to you for a couple of minutes before he leaves.”

“No problem,” I said. “As long as this doesn’t take the place of a phone call to his lawyer.”

“His lawyer will be meeting him down at the station,” the chief said.

He stepped aside, and Danny entered the kitchen. He was holding a sheaf of papers under one arm. The chief took up a position by the back door, and I could see a tall deputy standing just outside the doorway.

“I’m sorry,” Danny said. “I was supposed to be helping you and instead I ruined everything.”

I didn’t see any reason to disagree with him. If he was expecting me to pat his shoulder and tell him everything would be all right, he was doomed to disappointment.

“Helping you with what?” the chief asked, stepping forward.

“Investigating Dr. Wright and Dr. Blanco,” I said. “Before the murder happened, when we thought our only problem was keeping them from canceling the play and shooting down Ramon’s dissertation. I figured the more we knew about them, the better able we’d be to find a way to fight them. So I asked my brother to recommend someone to do the computer search. He steered me to Danny.”

The chief nodded and stepped back to his place by the door.

“I didn’t totally blow off your request,” Danny went on. “I started looking for information on Dr. Wright and Dr. Blanco. Mostly about Dr. Wright, of course, because I knew Bronwyn was so down on her. And I admit, I was thinking more about Bronwyn than Ramon.”

And perhaps he’d also instinctively realized that Dr. Wright was the real threat.

“And did you find anything of use?” I asked aloud.

“I think she and Blanco are—were . . . you know,” he went on. “An item.”

I glanced at the chief, who was listening intently and frowning.

“What makes you think that?” I asked Danny.

“Wright was always bonkers, hating drama students and giving them a hard time, but it wasn’t till about two years ago that she started pulling the really awful stuff. It’s like suddenly she knew she could get away with it.”

“Didn’t people complain?” I asked.

“At first,” he said. “But they figured out pretty quickly that complaining about Dr. Wright was not such a good idea.”

“Their complaints were ignored,” I said, nodding.

“Worse than that. Bad things happened. Their dorm room assignments got lost, their cafeteria access disappeared, their log-in to the campus computer system stopped working, they couldn’t get into the classes they wanted, their student-loan applications got lost in the system until after the deadline. Evil stuff like that.”

“And you think Blanco was responsible?”

“I can’t speak for the other departments,” Danny said. “But with the computer stuff, I know some of the guys who had to deal with cleaning it up, so I got the inside scoop. All the problems came from edits to the student data system made by various accounts in administrative services. Admin services unchecks the field that says you paid your dorm bill and bingo! Someone else shows up with all their stuff, expecting to move into your room. And no one much argues when it comes from admin services because you never get a straight answer—they blame it on the system. Even when they’re talking to the people who design and run the system; they don’t care, because if you push them too hard, they can make the same bad stuff happen to you.”

“And since Blanco’s from admin services, he must be to blame?”

“Well, that plus it all started happening a few months after he came. I figured he and Dr. Wright . . . you know.”

“You could be right,” I said. Not about the romantic relationship—I’d seen the two of them together and hadn’t noticed the slightest spark of chemistry between them. If they were romantically involved, Michael should have recruited both of them to teach acting classes. The besotted Danny clearly had romance on the brain.